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Time Lines de Runa Islam |
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Time Lines is the most recent film by the London-based artist Runa Islam. Shot in Barcelona and co-produced by the CASM, the film is being shown in the centre’s spacious main cloister until the middle of the month. In this same space in the latter part of 2003 Mabel Palacín showed La Distancia Correcta [The Correct Distance], a double projection that brought various elements cinematic elements into play. Here Mabel Palacín describes and analyses some of the film-related issues and the points of view present in Runa Islam’s work.
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MABEL PALACÍN
The subject of the film Time Lines is the city,
or rather, a city: Barcelona. For this the artist
sought out privileged vantage points from which to observe
it, and went to the eternal higher ground: the mountains
of Montjuïc and Tibidabo. She choses not to opt for
any old high point from which to see the city, rejecting
recent constructions such as Norman Foster’s Collserola
tower on the summit of Tibidabo and latest-generation
skyscrapers such as the luminous Agbar tower — a
choice that is intimately bound up with the melancholy
that pervades the film. Her preferred vantage points are
in the city’s two historic funfairs: the one on
Montjuïc, now dismantled, and the Parc d’Atraccions
on Tibidabo, which is still open. Before installing itself
in the now standard venue of the cinema, inherited from
the theatre, the habitual place of films was in the old
fairs and amusement parks. In the early days film was
seen as a mechanism that produced the illusion of reality,
an adjunct of the gallery of wonders, the freak show and
the popular entertainment.
Runa Islam picked out two of Tibidabo’s classic attractions: the first, the plane mounted on a revolving derrick at the very edge of the mountain (giving the person who boards it the illusion that they are really flying) appears very briefly at the start of the film. The second, an attraction dating from 1908, is a kind of seesaw that rotates through 360 degrees, with one end of the beam rising vertically into the air while the other remains on the ground. This is the highest point in Barcelona, and provides one of the strangest shots in the film thanks to the way the footage was cut.
But the greater part of Time Lines is taken up by the cable-car. Barcelona’s cable-car connects the mountain of Montjuïc with the port and affords a dramatically powerful view of the city as it slowly advances on its cable from one point of the city to another, with no possibility of any deviation in its course except one that would probably have tragic consequences. This slow movement is the protagonist of the film.
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Of course, the cable-car is not really a fairground attraction, but it does partake of some of the fairground’s recreational character in the exceptional views it offers and in the fact that it is mainly tourists that use it. Some one who takes a cable-car ride is not doing it simply to get from one place to another, but to enjoy a privileged bird’s-eye view of the city. Most local people have probably never been on it. Runa Islam does not live in Barcelona, and readily assumes the status of visitor, but she is also an artist who makes accomplishing videos and films that concern themselves with exploring the characteristics of the medium, and this adds a further dimension to her condition as tourist. The panoramas form part of something that the fairground offers: views. The view from high up gives the sensation of contemplating a territory ‘in its entirety’, the impression of understanding the world in its structure, over and above the mere perception. Climbing a mountain, ascending to a high point in order to watch something, to get a better view, is a matter of achieving the sufficient distance from which to comprehend the object.
The point of view from which an image is constructed is
a key component of the nature of the gaze. The point of
view that Runa Islam utilizes is a kind of bird’s-eye
view that, in theory, possesses the quality of opposing
intellection to perception. However, what we see in Time
Lines is not quite the city but, more exactly, the
fairground attractions from which the city is seen. The
machinery of the viewpoint is represented in the shot
and assumes a greater protagonism than the ‘view’
itself. What is photographed is the mechanism that is
designed to offer, by means of its autonomous movement
in space, a mobile view of the city: these artificial,
technical constructions provide sensations and add emotion,
by their movement, to the act of looking. Movement and
emotion, or the relationship that can be established between
the two, form a binomial that is essential to cinema.
But nothing of this appears in Time Lines, because
the film concentrates on the autonomous movements of the
attractions, produced by machines like the machinery that
makes possible the formal movement of the camera, lateral,
vertical and horizontal. Freed of human physical weight
the camera registers its own mechanical workings. Runa
Islam regards these constructions as ready-made
shot-sequences that generate a formal movement and displacement
of the prepared camera.
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The film has no linear narrative, but it does have a series of characters: they appear, they are there, more as models than as actors, and are photographed looking at the city from the attractions and the cable-car. They act as indicators of time by virtue of the clothes they are wearing. In the Tibidabo funfair a couple in late-19th-century costume are seen waving at the plane that comes in and out of the shot ‹the camera in this case does not follow the movement of the machinery‹ and that same couple, or another couple who seem to belong to the same period in time, also appear in the cabin of the seesaw that lifts them high above the city on top of the mountain. On the platform of the cable-car we find a group of characters that seem to have stepped out of a party in the 1920s to meet there a second group that look to be from the 1960s or 70s. Only the people we see inside the cabin of the cable-car appear to belong to the present time, mainly because of the way they are framed in the shot.
The weight of the film lies in the cable-car sequence, in the trajectory it follows between leaving one of the towers in a given historical moment, the 1920s, and arriving at the other in another era. The whole sequence is marked by the long slow take, moving away from the tower, a jump in time represented by a physical movement, so that the question of the time is enunciated beyond the title and of the lines of the cables against the sky.
The presentation on a large screen, viewed from a sufficient distance to see the film properly, the equivalent to the seventh row in a conventional cinema, does not seem to take into account the exhibition space, using it as a possible place in which to see a film. All of this leads to an approach to the work that is closer to the cinema as a practice.
Shot in 35 mm, with a running time of 17 minutes, Time Lines sets out to reveal aspects of the language of cinema that the
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seductive qualities of film usually conceal from view. Composed of stylized images, it addresses the relationship of origin between the pre-narrative cinema and the fairground machinery of the past —those recreational attractions— and by means of the strategic choice of privileged points for the camera it returns what the camera sees to the category of ‘views’.
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VOLUME 1 details
the activities held in the Centre d’Art Santa
Mònica between October 2003 and October 2004
in five sections: 5 minutes looks
at the role of an art centre as a catalyst of art
today; Glocal takes a look at specific
artistic realities; Cash, art and
economy; Context, Barcelona as work
context in art and Sound focuses
on the audio programming in the centre.
Catalan, Spanish and English editions.
Prize: 18 € |
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